Meaning and Anti-Meaning in Life and What Happens After We Die

The absence of meaningfulness in life is meaninglessness. But what is the polar opposite of meaningfulness? In recent and ongoing work together with Stephen Campbell and Marcello di Paola respectively, I have explored what we dub ‘anti-meaning’: the negative counterpart of positive meaning in life. Here, I relate this idea of ‘anti-meaningful’ actions, activities, and projects to the topic of death, and in particular the deaths or suffering of those who will live after our own deaths. Connecting this idea of anti-meaning and what happens after our own deaths to recent work by Samuel Scheffler on what he calls ‘the collective afterlife’ and his four reasons to care about future generations, I argue that if we today make choices or have lifestyles that later lead to unnecessarily early deaths and otherwise avoidable suffering of people who will live after we have died, this robs our current choices and lifestyles of some of their meaning, perhaps even making them the opposite of meaningful in the long run.

Terrorism and Its Claims to “Distinctive Significance”

Chapter 3 addresses four philosophical attempts to show that terrorist attacks, definitional issues aside, have a special moral significance. In their very different ways, these philosophers articulate a concern about terrorism also widely held amongst non-specialists. The philosophers addressing the idea of special significance most directly are Samuel Scheffler, Jeremy Waldron, and Lionel McPherson. Waldron does not use the phrase “special moral significance,” but the idea is at work in his discussion. The fourth is Karen Jones, who doesn’t use “special significance” but her discussion of terrorist disruption of “basal security” seems to mark some distinctive moral feature of terrorism in addition to its being a tactic committed to attacking non-combatants. That makes her claim relevant here. The chapter argues that these various attempts fail to make the strong case they promise, and that the failure is instructive for our understanding of terrorism and for policies to deal with it.

Distant Strangers and the Illusion of Separation

The human relationships underlying both international justice and intergenerational justice are less distant than commonly assumed, as Samuel Scheffler has argued, because causal webs tightly link persons across both space and time. Both the fossil-fuel energy regime that is causing climate change and the measures necessary to make the transition from that regime into an alternative energy regime impinge deeply upon the well-being of persons who have chosen neither the regime nor the transition, linking them across space. Similarly, the fates of persons in the distant future are in the hands of people living now because the time-of-last-opportunity to prevent disasters from becoming irreversible sometimes occurs centuries earlier than the start of the disaster itself. This is powerfully illustrated by the evident irreversibility of the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which will ultimately cause catastrophic rises in sea level across the globe.

Clarifying relational egalitarianism

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] I clarify the nature of relational egalitarianism, a theory in political philosophy that concerns equality. Relational egalitarians understand equality as a relationship between equals. Roughly, when people relate as equals, they are free from objectionable forms of authority (e.g., plutocracy) and stigmatizing social status (e.g., racist and sexist stereotypes). Relational egalitarians hold that we have duties of justice to promote this understanding of equality. Much work remains, however, in developing the best version of relational egalitarianism. To this end, I examine three prominent versions of relational egalitarianism, one by Elizabeth Anderson, another by Samuel Scheffler, and the third by Martin O'Neill. Each version, I argue, makes a mistake that sheds light on the best version of relational egalitarianism. In particular, I argue that relational egalitarians should endorse the following claims: (1) relational egalitarianism specifies many, but not all, duties of justice to promote equality, (2) relational egalitarianism is actually a version of distributive egalitarianism (its main rival), and (3) egalitarian relationships are morally bad when they make everyone's life go worse.